Binary Payloads

It seems like Metasploit is full of interesting and useful features. One of these is the ability to generate an executable from a Metasploit payload. This can be very useful in situations such as social engineering, if you can get a user to run your payload for you, there is no reason to go through the trouble of exploiting any software.

Let's look at a quick example of how to do this. We will generate a reverse shell payload, execute it on a remote system, and get our shell. To do this we will use the command line tool msfpayload. This command can be used for generating payloads to be used in many locations and offers a variety of output options, from perl to C to raw. We are interested in the executable output, which is provided by the X command.

We'll generate a Windows reverse shell executable that will connect back to us on port 31337. Notice that msfpayload operates the same way as msfcli in that you can append the letter 'O' to the end of the command string to see which options are available to you.

Now that we have everything set up and ready to go, we run 'exploit' for the multi/handler and execute our generated executable on the victim. The multi/handler handles the exploit for us and presents us our shell.